Do Government Interventions Improve Local Public Service Performance? Evidence From a Synthetic Control Approach

ABSTRACT Governments in many democratic countries have the mandate to require local authorities to address failures in the management and performance of the public services that they provide. Such policies often involve the takeover of authorities to implement improvements assumed to result in organizational turnaround. However, critics argue that locally‐directed change remains a more reliable means for achieving service transformation. To cast light on these issues, this paper applies a quasi‐experimental synthetic difference‐in‐differences approach to investigate whether partial takeovers of poorly‐performing education services in four Welsh local authorities in 2013 were effective in turning them around. The findings suggest that the establishment of independent recovery boards to oversee local education policy helped some of them to improve educational outcomes, but that local authorities were not always able to sustain improvements after the recovery boards were decommissioned. The study highlights that government interventions to improve local public service performance need to be focused on supporting long‐term organizational change.